“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I didn’t realize fast-penta could do that to you.”
He tried to say, It’s not your fault, but his powers of speech seemed to have relapsed. “D-d-d-i, diddi, do. Bad. Thing?”
She took far too long to reply. “Maybe it will be all right.”
Two hours later, they came with a float-pallet and moved him.
“We’re getting some other patients,” Dr. Chrys of the wing-hair told him blandly. “We need your room.” Lies? Half-truths?
Where they moved him to puzzled him most of all. He had visions of a locked cell, but instead they took him upstairs via a freight lift tube and deposited him on a camp-bed set up in Rowan’s personal suite. It was one of a row of similar chambers, presumably the Duronas’ residence-floor. Her suite consisted of a sitting room/study and a bedroom, plus a private bath. It was reasonably spacious, though cluttered. He felt less like a prisoner than like a pet, being smuggled against the rules into some women’s dormitory. Though he had seen another male-morph Dr. Durona besides Raven, a man of about thirty Dr. Chrys had addressed as “Hawk.” Birds and flowers, they were all birds and flowers in this concrete cage.
Later still, a young Durona brought dinner on a tray, and he ate together with Rowan at a little table in her sitting room as the grey day outside faded to dusk. He supposed there was no real change in his prisoner/patient status, but it felt good to be out of the hospital-style room, free of the monitors and sinister medical equipment. To be doing something so prosaic as having dinner with a friend.
He walked around the sitting room, after they ate. “Mind ’f I look it your things?”
“Go ahead. Let me know if anything comes up for you.”
She still would not tell him anything directly about himself, but she low seemed willing at least to talk about herself. His internal picture of the world shifted as they spoke. Why do I have wormhole maps in my head? Maybe he was going to have to recover himself the hard way . Learn everything that existed in the universe, and whatever was left, that dwarfish-man-shaped hole in the center, would be him by process of elimination. A daunting task.
He stared out the polarized window at the faint glitter hanging in he air, as if fairy dust were falling all around. He recognized the force screen for what it was, now, an improvement in cognition over is initial head-first encounter with it. The shield was military-grade, he realized, impermeable down to viruses and gas molecules, and up to … what? Projectiles and plasma, certainly. Must be a powerful generator around here somewhere. The protection was a late add-on to the building’s architecture, not incorporated into its design. Some history inherent there… . “We are on Jackson’s Whole, aren’ we?” he asked.
“Yes. What does that mean to you?”
“Danger. Bad things happenin’. What is this pla’?” He waved around.
“The Durona Clinic.”
“Ya, so? What you do? Why’m I here?”
“We are the personal clinic of House Fell. We do all sorts of medical tasks for them, as needed.”
“House Fell. Weapons.” The associations fell into place quite automatically. “Biological weapons.” He eyed her accusingly.
“Sometimes,” she admitted. “And biological defenses, too.”
Was he a House Fell trooper? A captured enemy trooper? Hell, what army would employ a half-crippled dwarf as any kind of trooper?
“House Fell give me to you to do?”
“No.”
“No? S—why’m I here?”
“That’s been a great puzzle for us, too. You arrived frozen in a cryo-chamber, with every sign of having been prepped in great haste, a crate addressed to me, via common carrier, with no return address. We hoped if we revived you, you could tell us.”
“ ’S more goin’ on than that.”
“Yes,” she said frankly.
“Bu’ you won’ tell me.”
“Not yet.”
“Wha’ happens if I walk outta here?”
She looked alarmed. “Please don’t. That could get you killed.”
“Again.”
“Again,” she nodded.
“By who?”
“That … depends on who you are.”
He veered off the subject, then ran the conversation around to it three more times, but could not lull or trick her into telling him any more about himself. Exhausted, he gave up for the night, only to lie awake on his cot worrying the problem as a predator might worry a carcass. But all his bone-tossing did no good but to freeze his mind with frustration. Sleep on it, he told himself. Tomorrow must bring him something new. Whatever else this situation was, it wasn’t stable. He felt that, felt balanced as though on a knife-edge; below him lay darkness, concealing feathers or sharpened stakes or maybe nothing at all, an endless fall.
He wasn’t quite sure of the rationale behind the hot bath and the therapeutic massage. Exercise, now, he could see that; Dr. Chrys had lugged in an exercise bicycle to Rowan’s study, and let him sweat himself near to passing out. Anything that painful must be good for him. No push-ups yet, though. He’d tried one, and collapsed with a wide-eyed, muffled squeak of agony, and been yelled at quite firmly by an irate Dr. Chrys for attempting unauthorized bodily motions.
Dr. Chrys had made notes and gone off again, leaving him to Rowan’s tenderer mercies. He lay now steaming gently in Rowan’s bed, dressed in a towel, while she reviewed skeleto-muscular structure all up and down his back. Dr. Chrys’s fingers, doing massage, had been like probes. Rowan’s hands caressed. Not anatomically equipped to purr, he did manage a small, encouraging moan of appreciation now and then. She worked down to his feet and toes, and started back up.
Face down, mashed comfortably into her pillows, he became gradually aware that a very important bodily system was reporting for duty, for the first time since his revival. Res-erection indeed. His face flushed in a mixture of embarrassment and delight, and he flung an arm up as-if-casually to conceal his expression. She’s your doctor. She’ll want to know. It wasn’t as if she weren’t intimately familiar with every part of his body, inside and out, already. She’d been up to her bloody elbows in him, literally. He stayed hidden in his arm-cave anyway.
“Roll over,” Rowan said, “and I’ll do your other side.”
“Er … d’rather not,” he mumbled into the pillow.
“Why not?”
“Um … ’member how you keep askin’ if somethin’ has come up for me?”
“Yes …”
“Well … somethin’ has.”
There was a brief silence, then, “Oh! In that case, definitely roll over. I need to examine you.”
He took a breath. “Things we do fer science.”
He rolled over, and she took away his towel. “Has this happened before?” she inquired.
“No. Firs’ time in my life. This life.”
Her long cool fingers probed quickly, medically. “That looks good,” she said with enthusiasm.
“Thank you,” he carolled cheerfully.
She laughed. He didn’t need a memory to tell him it was a very good sign when a woman laughed at his jokes at this point. Experimentally, gently, he pulled her down to face him. Hooray for science. Let’s see what happens. He kissed her. She kissed him back. He melted.
Speech and science were both put aside for a time, after that. Not to mention the green coat and all the layers underneath. Her body was as lovely as he’d imagined, a pure aesthetic of line and curve, softness and floral, hidden places. His own body contrasted vividly, a little rack of bones scored with shocking red scars.
An intense consciousness of his recent death welled up in him, and he found himself kissing her frantically, passionately, as if she were life itself and he could so consume and possess her. He didn’t know if she was enemy or friend, if this was a right or wrong thing. But it was warm and liquid and moving, not icy and still, surely the most opposite thing imaginable to cryo-stasis. Seize the day. Because the night waited, coldly implacable. This lesson burned from his center outward, like radiation. Her eyes widened. Only his shortness of breath forced him to slow down to a more decorous, reasonable pace.